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Friday, June 10, 2005

IT'S
TIME. In yesterday's Boston Globe, columnist Jeff Jacoby reported
the following about a major U.S. bank:

AS SOON as he learned the ugly truth,
the chairman of financial-services giant Wachovia
Corp. issued a remorseful nostra culpa. ''We are deeply saddened
by these findings," Ken Thompson said last week. ''I apologize to all
Americans, and especially to African-Americans." Wachovia acknowledged
that it ''cannot change the past or atone for the harm that was done."
But it promised to make amends by subsidizing the work of organizations
involved in ''furthering awareness and education of African-American
history."

It's not hard to guess the subject of all this remorse: slavery.
Wachovia must somehow be implicated in the American slave trade of the
19th century. Here's how:

The 13th Amendment abolished slavery in
1865, and Wachovia wasn't founded until 1879. The slaves for which
Thompson was so apologetic were owned decades before the Civil War,
when slavery was still lawful throughout the South. They were owned not
by Wachovia but by the Bank of Charleston and the Georgia Railroad and
Banking Co. -- two of the approximately 400 financial institutions
dating back to 1781 that over the centuries merged with or were
acquired by other institutions that eventually became part of the
conglomerate known today as Wachovia.

In other words, Thompson's apology was for something Wachovia didn't
do, in an era when it didn't exist, under laws it didn't break. And as
an act of contrition for this wrong it never committed, it can now
expect to pay millions of dollars to activists for a wrong they never
suffered.

Jacoby's point in telling us all this is to highlight a legal fad which
began in the City of Chicago and which has since spread to Detroit, Los
Angeles, and Philadelphia; the operative mechanism is an ordinance
requiring all bidders for city business to disclose any links between
their institutions and the conduct of slavery in the pre-Civil War
United States. The purpose is to build a documentable legal basis for
the exactment of reparations from businesses which were in any way
involved in slavery when it was legal. Jacoby correctly points out that
these kinds of legal antics are only the hors d'oeuvres of an
anticipated feast backed by what may prove to be an inexhaustible
appetite:

If Thompson thought he would put the
slavery issue to rest by apologizing abjectly and promising to put even
more money into ''diversity" and ''organizations that support
African-Americans," he was mistaken. No sooner had he issued his
statement than it was dismissed as insufficient. ''Wachovia can and
must do more," declared the head of one advocacy group in the Raleigh
News & Observer. ''It . . . must reinvest in the communities and
the people who have been wronged." Harvard law professor Charles
Ogletree, a key reparations strategist, warned Wachovia that if it
doesn't ''provide comfort to the descendants of slaves," this issue
''will haunt them for a long time."

Jacoby concludes by suggesting that reparations are a Pandora's Box
which will do little good to open and may do much harm, including the
exacerbation of national wounds that should be permitted to heal:

America long ago paid the price for
slavery: a horrific Civil War that killed 620,000 soldiers, more than
half of them from the North. It is as
vile to insist that white Americans today owe a debt for slavery as it
would be to insist that black Americans owe a debt for freedom.
What the reparations extremists are demanding would make a mockery of
historical truth and inflame racial strife. Their cynicism is toxic,
and corporate America had better find the courage to say so. [emphasis
added]

His article is worth reading in
full (registration required), but his appeal to reason,
forgiveness, and institutional guts seems unlikely to stem the tide that
is now building to flood force. Therefore, I am going to take the
argument precisely in the direction decried by the sentence boldfaced
above -- not for the purpose of transforming the descendants of slaves
into debtors, but to illuminate the only rational basis on which
reparations could be calculated in dollars and cents. I know that it's
risky to apply cold logic to an issue so fueled by emotion, but I ask
readers to follow my logic to its conclusion before exploding in
righteous fury.

The first step is to acknowledge that any claim of reparations pursued
through the courts now is on behalf of people who have not themselves
been slaves. The specific pain and suffering illustrated by the
photograph(s) above was committed by people who are now dead against
victims who are now dead. All possibility of reparations as a moral
expiation of guilt is moot because all parties to the immoral
acts involved have been deceased for about a century. For this reason,
the
question of what reparations might be owed to the descendants of slaves
must be a purely financial one, computed in terms of opportunity cost;
that is, what financial losses are still being experienced by
African-Americans that they wouldn't be experiencing if slavery had
never existed in this country.

It is easy to see that the only valid comparisons we can make in this
regard are between contemporary African-Americans and contemporary
sub-Saharan Africans. The latter are the control population -- that
population which was NOT captured, chained, sold to slave traders, and
carried to American states for resale to slave owners. It is equally
easy to see that the only statistic which matters is the lifetime
financial expectations of African-Americans versus those of sub-Saharan
Africans.

Lifetime financial expectations can be estimated based on two
variables: per capita income and years of life expectancy. A
contemporary African-American must accept the premise that without
slavery in the U.S., his lifetime financial expectations would be those
of an average contemporary sub-Saharan African, which can be calculated
according to the following formula: Number
of years of life expectancy multiplied by average annual per capita
income.

Granted, these numbers are hard to acquire with a high degree of
accuracy,
but we can make approximate estimates based on surveys and studies
which have been performed in recent years. For example, with respect to
life expectancy, a 2000 report from the World Health
Organization provides a worldwide summary, including this:

All of the bottom 10 countries were in
sub-Saharan Africa, where the HIV-AIDS epidemic is rampant. In
ascending order... those countries were Sierra Leona, 25.9 years of
healthy life for babies born in 1999; Niger, 29.1; Malawi, 29.4;
Zambia, 30.3; Botswana, 32.3; Uganda, 32.7; Rwanda, 32.8; Zimbabwe,
32.9; Mali, 33.1; and Ethiopia, 33.5.

The overall life expectancy in sub-Saharan Africa has dropped
precipitously over the past 10 years, mostly because of the AIDS
epidemic, the WHO says. Life expectancy dropped for female babies from
51.1 years to 46.3 years. For males, the level dropped from 47.3 years
to 44.8 years.

To be conservative, we should round the figure upward; call it 50
years, on
average. And what of per capita income? The figures that are available
to us come from sources like the World
Bank. A written summary of the year 2003 states:

In marked contrast to East and South
Asia, poverty actually rose in Sub-Saharan Africa. Since 1981, a
13-percent contraction in GDP per capita in Sub-Saharan Africa resulted
in a near-doubling of the number of people living on less than $1 a
day, from 164 million to 314 million, a rise from 42 to 47 percent of
the region's population.

Close to half of sub-Saharan Africans make less than $365 per year. For
them, lifetime financial expectations are less than $18,250. Obviously,
the 53 percent who make more than that may make considerably more than
that, and fortunately the World Bank does break out figures for
individual
countries. Here's a link to a spreadsheet
that captures the World Bank figures for Sub-Saharan African nations
(2003) and also captures population data from another source.
The result is a computation of per capita income for all of Sub-Saharan
Africa: $509.

This gives us an easy way for anyone to guesstimate his lifetime
financial expectations if he happened to live in Sub-Saharan Africa. We
can call it the "50-500 Formula": (50 years ) x ($500) = $25,000.

If this number turns out to be greater than the lifetime financial
expectations of an average African-American, the descendants of
American slaves can sue for the difference.

What do we know about per-capita income for African Americans? Here's
an indication, drawn from a Tennessee
source that cites national census data:

African-Americans moved closer to per
capita income parity between 2000 and 2002. In the former year,
African-American real (inflation-adjusted) per capita income was
$15,451. Although that number decreased $10 over the following two
years to $15,441, overall per capita income fell even more, declining
$541. As a result, African-American per capita income increased from
66.2 percent of per capita income for the general population in 2000 to
67.7 percent in 2002.

Oops. It begins to look as if any African-American who lives at least
two years is going to enjoy a higher lifetime income than a Sub-Saharan
African. What can we determine about life
expectancy?

Racial disparities in life expectancy
have declined since 1960. However, the pace of the decline is slower
than what occurred in earlier years. For both blacks and whites,
improvements in the life expectancy are relatively very small. From
1960 to 1990 the life expectancy for whites increased from 70.6 to 76.1
years, and for blacks the life expectancy increased from 63.2 to 69.1
years.

Finally, we can compute our average per capita reparations owed to
African-Americans: $25,000 minus $1,000,000 = ($975,000). Of course, the
brackets and red type indicate that it's a negative
number, meaning no reparations owed.
End of legal case. Period.

I am not going to argue that African-Americans should feel grateful
about the enslavement of their ancestors, but I will propose that our
30 million African-Americans acknowledge they are far better off in
America than their 600 million ancestral cousins are in Africa, living
on average 20 years longer and making approximately 40 times as much
money. In addition, they no longer face the prospect of becoming enslaved, which many Africans
cannot say. Here's an excerpt from an overview on modern slavery.

When a ship carrying hundreds of people
was recently turned away from Benin, Africa, officials suspected that
the children on board were human slaves. The incident once again
brought attention to the problem of slavery. At this moment, millions
of men, women, and children—roughly twice the population of Rhode
Island—are being held against their will as modern-day slaves.

Sometimes referred to as bonded laborers (because of the debts owed
their masters), public perception of modern slavery is often confused
with reports of workers in low-wage jobs or inhumane working
conditions. However, modern-day slaves differ from these workers
because they are actually held in physical bondage (they are shackled,
held at gunpoint, etc.)...

The slave trade in Africa was officially banned in the early 1880s, but
forced labor continues to be practiced in West and Central Africa
today. UNICEF estimates that 200,000 children from this region are sold
into slavery each year. Many of these children are from Benin and Togo,
and are sold into the domestic, agricultural, and sex industries of
wealthier, neighboring countries such as Nigeria and Gabon....

The enslavement of the Dinkas in southern Sudan may be the most
horrific and well-known example of contemporary slavery. According to
1993 U.S. State Department estimates, up to 90,000 blacks are owned by
North African Arabs, and often sold as property in a thriving slave
trade for as little as $15 per human being.

Animist tribes in southern Sudan are frequently invaded by Arab
militias from the North, who kill the men and enslave the women and
children. The Arabs consider it a traditional right to enslave
southerners, and to own chattel slaves (slaves owned as personal
property).

Physical mutilation is practiced upon these slaves not only to prevent
escape, but to enforce the owners' ideologies. According to an ASI
report: "Kon, a thirteen-year-old Dinka boy, was abducted by Arab
nomads and taken to a merchant's house. There he found several Dinka
men hobbling, their Achilles tendons cut because they refused to become
Muslims. Threatened with the same treatment the boy converted."

In point of fact, only one of the two photos at the beginning of this
article is of an American slave. The photo on the right is only a few
years old. It shows the legs of a boy named Joseph
who was crucified by his slavemaster in the Sudan.

The United States of America indisputably has slavery as a part of its
past. But if we can seriously be entreated today to wipe out all the
current debts owed by the corrupt and frequently vicious governments of
Africa, then perhaps African-Americans can finally forgive the debts
owed by long dead white men to their long dead ancestors. Sound
reasonable?

I'm guessing it won't sound reasonable to a lot of you. I await the
deluge.